


crossing midline

by stiction



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, Polyamory, Threesome - F/F/M, alex reagan gets caught between two no good very hot mysterious people, cabin fever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 00:32:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7991986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"People get lonely," Alex says, staring at Coralee's fingers on the bloodied glove, then at Coralee. "Twenty years is a long time."</p><p>Coralee holds her gaze. The glove comes off with a soft snap. </p><p>"Yes," Coralee agrees. "Yes, it is."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the longest wavelength

Strand is a terrible driver.

Alex discovers this on the California coastal roads--that Strand’s focus splits between the road and the conversation at hand. He makes her hold up crime scene photographs and pages of evidence, of testimony, and glances at them long enough that the wheels drift across the center line.

It’s endearing, if a little terrifying.

In New Mexico, Alex finds out that Coralee is even worse.

“What turn?” Coralee shouts over her shoulder. Wind rushes in through the shattered passenger’s window. Alex has glass in her hair and no time to shake it out. Her hands are covered in blood, more blood moment to moment.

“Left on--” Her throat closes, sticks. 

“What turn?”

Alex laces her fingers tighter, presses her shirt down on the wound in Strand’s chest.

“Oak!”

“Fuck,” Coralee hisses. “Hold on.”

Alex shoves her feet against the front seats just in time for the car to slam to a near halt, careening around the turn.

“Three miles down,” Alex says without prompting. “It’s the green house.”

Coralee is silent. Her shoulders are tight up around her ears.

“How is he?”

She doesn’t have a word for the ashy tone in his skin. “Unconscious.”

Coralee swears softly, stomps on the gas even as the car rattles.

Three minutes pass as a lifetime before Coralee repeats: “Hold on.”

She swings the car around, behind the house, and is out of the driver’s seat before Alex can shift her grip. The back door opens and Coralee appears. Her face is dusty, splattered with blood, and even dirty her hair is golden in the sun.

“We need to get him inside,” she says.

“Yeah,” Alex gasps, still a little numb as she scrambles to help lift Strand off the seat, choosing to ignore the way Coralee’s eyes dig into her. “God, he’s fucking heavy.”

They stagger under his weight for a moment before Alex can bear down, lift with her knees. Coralee only shakes a little as she gains her footing. She reaches across and grabs Alex’s forearm. They brace Strand together, one tall man on two clenched arms.

It’s unsettling that Coralee already knows what key unlocks the back door, unsettling that she moves through the house like this is normal.

“Guest bedroom,” she grits out, and: “It’s got dark sheets.”

Alex doesn’t ask how she knows--only shuffles down the narrow hallway towards the guest room.

They get him onto the bed, sprawled out with his shirt soaked with blood and his boots dusting clay all over the sheets.

“Go get water,” Coralee tells her. “I can take it from there.”

Limbs divorced of any free will, Alex does it. She comes back with the gallon jug, two cups. It’s warm, but Coralee only nods and keeps digging through the pack she dumped on the nightstand. Alex can see gauze, thread, antiseptic--until her vision vibrates and she finds herself stumbling into the kitchen again.

The faucet only runs lukewarm. It’s enough, if only to splash on her face and scrub at the dirt and blood and sweat on her hands.

She takes a wooden kitchen chair and drags it down the hallway to listen to the sounds of Coralee at work.

* * *

 

It’s dark outside when the door opens.

Alex jerks out of a dream--a cave. She’s crawling towards the light, towards the figure standing silhouetted against the blinding sun, and then--

And then she blinks against the darkness. Coralee eases the door mostly shut behind herself. Her shoulders are hanging now.

Coralee strips one glove off with a snap so loud that Alex flinches as she reaches for the hall’s lightswitch. She looks even more exhausted in the light, Alex thinks.

"He'll be fine," Coralee says.

"You're sure about that?"

Alex is thinking about all that blood in the backseat of his car, about feeling his pulse through her laced hands pressing down, down even as it all welled up. Thinking about the moments prior.

Coralee pauses. Her fingers are pinching the other glove at the inside of the wrist. Textbook first aid: avoidance of bloodborne pathogens. Did she learn first aid at DavaCorp? Did she teach herself?

"You really did sleep with him," Coralee says. Her eyes pin Alex to the wall. "Didn't you."

"That's none of your business," Alex says. She’s tired, so tired, but all the most contrary parts of her resent being interrogated by someone who's supposed to be dead.

"Oh," Coralee sighs. "I'd say that definitely qualifies as my business."

She doesn't sound angry, or jealous. Just… a little amused. The way she says it makes Alex's stomach clench despite the fear, makes her want to _force_ Coralee to care.

"People get lonely," she says, staring at Coralee's fingers on the bloodied glove. Then at Coralee. "Twenty years is a long time."

Coralee holds her gaze. Alex notices dumbly that her eyes are beautiful like Strand's. Dark blue and green in the soft light. It's easy to see where Charlie gets it from.

The glove comes off with another, softer snap.

"Yes," Coralee agrees. “Yes, it is.”

Her shoulder brushes Alex's when she passes, leaves her alone in the hallway with the stale air.

* * *

 

She finds Coralee on the back porch with a lit citronella candle.

The heat has sunk into a desert night. She feels like Coralee should be smoking, but she isn’t; she’s sitting back in a lawn chair with a gun in her lap, staring hard into the darkness.

The recorder is somewhere in the car, probably covered in blood, so Alex comes out to sit on the porch railing empty-handed.

“How did you find us?” She asks finally.

There’s still a little blood in Coralee’s hair. Alex’s, too.

“After last time,” Coralee says, “I slipped a tracker onto Richard’s car.”

“Oh.” It seems simple, in retrospect. “And you followed us?”

Coralee makes a soft noise in her throat. “No, actually. I was following DavaCorp. But the fact that the two of you were on converging paths was… cause for concern.” She shifts her grip on the gun. “So I sped up.”

“You saw them?” Alex whispers. “You saw it happen?”

“I was trying to head you two off.” Coralee ducks her head. “I was expecting them to try to snatch you up again, not t-bone you. They must be getting desperate.”

Alex wishes she was smoking. Wishes she was back in Seattle. Wishes she could chase the nervous energy in her body out, wishes she could keep her composure around Coralee.

“He knew they were coming,” she says, instead of wishing.

Coralee finally looks at her.

“We were looking for another cave,” Alex continues. “But the coordinates were off. It was a lot farther from the house than we’d planned for. I wanted to come back, to get more supplies. So we turned around, and after a few minutes he said--”

* * *

 

“Alex,” Strand says. She looks away from the road. “I think we’re being followed.”

She takes her feet off the dash and cranes her neck to see out the back window. There are a few cars behind them--it’s a quiet town, but not dead yet. Traffic still exists at noon on a Friday.

“I don’t see anything.”

“The silver car. It’s been following us since we turned back onto pavement.”

Alex can make out a silver car, three back, if she squints. “Then keep going?”

“We can’t lead them back to the house.” Strand takes a hard left turn, then rolls through a stop sign onto a deserted highway.

“Hold on,” Alex says. Nervous energy floods through her as she opens up the glove compartment and digs inside for a map. “There’s, uh… Not really anything out here.”

“Nowhere to lose them?” Strand sighs, impatient, and leans over to look at the map.

“It’s all empty highways,” Alex insists, just before the right side of the car explodes into glass and twisted metal.

* * *

 

“I couldn’t get out,” Alex says. Her hands look small in the candlelight. “The door was wrecked. I tried to shake Richard, to wake him up, but…”

“There were three of them,” Coralee offers. “One mildly concussed Richard Strand wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

She’s smiling a little when Alex looks over at her.

“What did you do to them?”

Coralee’s smile sours. She looks down towards her gun. “I probably should’ve killed them.”

“You didn’t?”

“I needed to get him out of there without anyone following,” she says. “That was the priority, and I had a stolen car and a stun gun to do it with.”

* * *

 

Alex doesn’t register anything other than a roaring sound in her ears for ten full seconds.

Feeling seeps back in--pain in her neck, her knees aching where they hit the dashboard. There’s a raw patch of skin on her chest where the seatbelt jerked her back. No airbags. She fumbles out to the left, grasping fingers against a shirt, against the hot skin of Strand’s neck.

His head is hanging down, chin to chest. Blood at his hairline. She fumbles with her own seatbelt and chokes on frustration, wrenches herself half-out of her seat to shake his shoulder.

“Richard,” she says. “Richard.”

Somewhere outside she hears a door roll open, and her heart throbs in her throat.

She reaches down again. Any attempt to unlock her seatbelt has turned into panicked yanking, sinking the belt further into her lap. Alex is choking on something, pain or blood or panic. She’s bit her lip or her tongue or both.

A pair of boots hits the pavement and Alex swallows her breath, ducks down below the edge of the window.

Before she has the gall to peek up over it, another deafening crunch of metal and glass rips through the air.

* * *

 

Alex stifles a hysterical laugh.

“Suave plan,” she says.

Coralee shrugs, but the smile is back. Her grip on the gun relaxes.

“So… Let me get this straight.” Alex watches Coralee tilt her face up, posture soft even when her eyes are sharp. “You put a tracker on Richard’s car--just for kicks. Then, in the process of hunting down Thomas Warren, you decided to come save us for the second time in as many months, again, for… what? And not only do you steal a car and use it as a battering ram, you whip out a Taser to finish the job.”

“A stun gun,” Coralee corrects, and Alex throws her hands up, suddenly full of that nervous energy and topped off with the kind of exasperation that only comes from _Strands_.

“Oh, that’s right, a stun gun. How silly of me, now all of the bizarre things leading up to this moment make perfect sense.”

She want to continue, wants to hop down off the railing and shake Coralee’s shoulders until answers come out of her mouth, wants to tug at this one enigmatic string and have all the answers she’s looking for tumble out onto the floor.

But Coralee laughs, actually laughs. It’s tired and a little hoarse, and sobered by the way she runs her hand over the gun in her lap, but. Jesus. It’s not hard to imagine Strand going crazy for her. It’s not hard at all.

“Why?” She repeats, once Coralee quiets. “Really, Coralee--why?”

Alex looks at her. There’s a subtle soft change to Coralee’s face now. Still upturned towards her until her chin drops. Then her gaze slides off, out across the dark desert and the cliffs that almost frame the yard.

“I’m going to go check on Richard,” Coralee says finally, and Alex thinks she might already know _why_.

* * *

 

She checks on him again before she goes to bed, as well.

Strand wakes slowly. He’s warm to the touch, still sweating despite the cooling temperature.

“Alex,” he says.

“Yeah. It’s me.” The bed creaks when she sits, and Strand’s hand falls against her leg. Alex puts her hand in his, grips as firmly as she dares. “You look… conscious.”

Strand chuckles. His blink is slow, dazed. She leans in to check his pupils. They’re even, thank god, even if he looks like hell.

“How do you feel?”

“Conscious.”

Alex squeezes his hand. In between Seattle and Chamberino, she somehow stopped thinking about the danger. She’s been tired. Too many hours on the road and too few hours spent sleeping. It makes sense that Strand never forgot.

“I’m sorry,” Alex says.

“You’re sorry?” Strand repeats. He actually sits up, despite her hands on his shoulders and the bandage on his chest.

“Stop,” Alex groans. “You’re gonna mess up the stitches.”

Strand pauses. “The stitches,” he repeats again, echolalic. “I have stitches.”

“I wish this was funny.” Alex shakes her head, lays her palm over the bandage. There’s the slightest tinge of pink coming through, and if he’s not careful it’ll be soaked by the time the sun comes up.

He looks down, inspects it, and his face is--he looks. He looks like Chicago last year.

“Coralee,” he says.

“Coralee,” she says.

“I thought--” Strand moves to hunch forward and this time Alex does stop him. “I didn’t think she was actually here.”

“She is,” Alex murmurs. “She has a gun.”

“Of course she does.”

He puts his hand over hers almost without thinking, and a part of the strangeness in her chest softens.

“Richard. You need to sleep.”

“I want to know what’s going on, Alex.”

“In the morning,” she says. It doesn’t come out the way she wants it to, but he accepts it.

“In the morning.”

They sit there, still, his hand over her hand, nearly over the bandage. She doesn’t pull away when he moves in to kiss her. Not for a long few moments, until the thought of Coralee being under the same roof surfaces. She wouldn’t call the feeling guilt.  

“Good night,” she says. “Don’t die.”

Alex shuts the light off, slips out into the hall.

The house is silent. She tries to muffle the creak of the old stairs on her way to the master bedroom. It looks sullen and empty, and she hates the thought of sleeping there alone.

With no shower, no rest, Alex lets herself fall into the bed. Lets herself feel the ache in her neck, the bruises on her knees. The scraped skin on her chest tingles when she touches it.

She probably looks like hell, she thinks, and that’s the thought that chases her down into sleep.


	2. you, her, and me

She dreams about her apartment in Seattle.

She’s standing in front of the dark green door with a heavy ring of keys in her hand. There are so many there, and she can’t figure out which one opens the door. When she finally unlocks it, there are voices coming from the kitchen. Strand and Coralee are sitting at the kitchen island, three steaming mugs sitting out. One in front of each of them, and the third in front of an unoccupied stool.

She can smell her favorite tea--chamomile, honeyed--from the doorway. The two of them break out of a quiet conversation and turn towards her. Strand’s face registers surprise, and Coralee... Coralee smiles and moves her hand away from the gun on the table between them. She opens her mouth to say something.

Alex wakes up with blood under her nails.

The master bedroom is still empty. Her apartment in Seattle, however vivid a dream, is still empty. Her mail is piling up, since Nic is busy and distracted and forgetful all at once. The plant on her windowsill is probably wilting.

So Strand, then, is still downstairs, and Coralee… Alex imagines her briefly in the small guest bed, curled tight against Strand’s side. She knows the image isn’t real. But still, she thinks, in the wake of her dream: after twenty years of separation, they haven’t been able to forget how to cohabitate. How to stand next to each other and exude _together_ without holding hands or even looking at one another.

Even if they have, it’s all in the muscle memory. You spend so many years pushing someone’s hair behind their ears and you can’t just _stop_ now, not if their hair is hanging in their face.

Flat on her back, Alex mulls the thought over, picking at the blood and dirt caked into her hands.

They look good together, sound good together. Richard and Coralee Strand.

Both tall. Serious faces. People that you would remember even if you only met them once. It’s hard to deny the way the air might charge if they were in the same room. It would be electric, being the only other person in that room.

She gets up, finally, once her train of thought becomes a circle.

Downstairs, Alex finds blankets on the couch, evidence of a hastily made space to sleep. They hadn’t been able to bring too much with them, but she digs around in the kitchen and settles on a bowl of dry cereal.

It’s almost noon, the sun high and strong through the windows.

When she’s done, the bowl goes in the sink and the cereal back in one of the cupboards, and Alex moves into the hallway to Strand’s room.

Someone laughs in the bathroom before a quiet conversation continues, and she freezes. Listens.

There’s Coralee, saying, “I’d be more likely to believe you if you weren’t already bleeding in three places beside your chest.”

And Strand: “I’ve managed.”

Alex’s heart thrums as she moves her foot away from the creaking floorboards in front of her. They’ve been here less than a week but she knows the loud spots well already. It pays to be paranoid. She sidles up to the bathroom door--it’s open a few inches, and she can hear quiet movement.

“I know,” Coralee says. Her teasing tone is gone. “You’re very self-sufficient.”

Alex moves to just the right angle to see inside.

There’s Strand, seated on the closed toilet, and Coralee, standing between his knees.

His face is lathered--that’s familiar to Alex. It reminds her of the mornings-after in hotels where Strand woke early and came back to bed with a smooth face. She would smell the shaving cream and reach to put her hands on his jaw.

What’s unfamiliar to her is the hand he has resting at the small of Coralee’s back.

It looks familiar to _him_.

It twists something funny in her stomach and a heat like taking a shot of whiskey rises up. She’s not drunk, but it makes her dizzy nonetheless. Alex supposes that she was right, then: that the body never forgets.

Somehow she expects a straight razor, expects a bowl of something foamy and hand-whipped. Nothing less from the Strands. But when she shifts her foot onto a spot that creaks and Coralee turns toward her, it’s just a disposable razor. A can of Barbasol. The sleeves of Coralee’s flannel are rolled up and Alex gets a little lost in how comfortable they look.

“Morning,” she says.

Strand didn’t flinch when the door opens. His posture is slightly slanted, like he shifted to one angle and didn’t want to move. His hand stays on Coralee’s back, but when she leans over to run the razor under the faucet he does look to Alex.

And like last night--like the face he made in her dream--the emotion she picks up isn’t guilt, not exactly. But something burns just under Alex’s skin, something matched in the way Strand looks at her. She can feel Coralee’s eyes on her; when she meets that gaze she sees it there, too.

Coralee breaks the silence.

“You want to try?” Coralee says. “I don’t trust a man to shave when he’s on as many painkillers as Richard is.”

She holds the razor out like she expects Alex to say no, to defer to the shared history that dwarfs her own. Alex swallows despite herself; the word _wife_ only loses some of its potency when the word before it is _missing_.

Their fingers touch when Alex takes the razor, and the challenge in Coralee’s eyes is met.

“Watch his neck,” she says, and winks when Alex nods slightly. “He’s already nicked himself a few times.”

Coralee shifts to trade places with her. She moves to lean against the sink and Alex takes her place between Strand’s knees.

He tilts his face up when she nudges his chin. Even as he mumbles a low protest, Alex braces his jaw with her thumb and tries to convince herself it’s just like shaving her legs. Coralee’s eyes are burning straight into her shoulders, making the back of Alex’s neck prickle as she makes one slow, initial pass with the razor.

She gets clean skin, no nicks, and what feels like one step down a path she stumbled upon in the center of a deep, unfamiliar forest.

His hand moves to cup the back of her thigh, high enough that Alex shivers a little. It’s hard not to look back at Coralee over her shoulder. Harder still when it’s not clear why she would need to, except to meet Coralee’s appraising gaze. Alex focuses on the textured handle of the razor, the soft resistance she gets on each pass, and avoids thinking about what kind of look she would find in Coralee’s eyes.

It goes pass, rinse, pass, rinse, and slowly Strand’s posture relaxes. The rhythm is almost soothing. She holds her breath at the tight spots, wills her hand to steady.

When Strand’s face is clean, she rubs a thumb over one cheek to feel the soft skin. Another hand joins hers, Coralee shadowing her movement.

“Good job,” Coralee murmurs, suddenly close enough to Alex that her breath warms the nape of Alex’s neck..

“Thanks,” Alex says. Her hand brushes Coralee’s for a moment, and she’s struck by the picture of it--two different hands on one face. She holds her breath and doesn’t move away until Coralee does.

“I’m going to go check the perimeter,” Coralee says.

When Alex turns towards the open door, the room is empty and Strand is quiet.

* * *

 

She’d expected to feel left out, somehow. The thought was childish, but stuck fast. Coralee was back, and she was saving Strand’s life on the regular, and now that Alex had served her purpose she would be sent back to Seattle to work on a different, harmless story. She’d be safe.

But being here, existing with both of them is… unique.

Sitting at the tiny table in the kitchen and eating lunch is almost natural. When Alex finishes making sandwiches and goes to the table, their chairs are the same distance from each other’s as they are from Alex’s, an even spacing around the circle. Coralee thanks her quietly. The conversation doesn’t go the way she’d expected. Nobody reminisces, and the closest thing to an inside joke Strand makes is a reference to an academic journal he loaned Coralee in 1992 and never got back. Alex has been in conversations with old lovers before, but the strain that comes from a lack of closure now seems linked to her just as much as the others.

After a late dinner, Strand excuses himself to lay down and Coralee clears the table, and Alex is left to sit and stare down at the faint watermarks left by whoever lived here before. The finish is dull and worn, one of the legs uneven. She had to rip one flap off of the box of cereal and fold it to keep the table level.

"Aren't you going to ask if we should take him to a hospital?" Coralee asks.

Alex jumps, turns to see Coralee looking over her shoulder at her. She's leaning over the kitchen sink, scrubbing at their dinner plates.

"I wasn't going to," she says. Strand left maps all over the table before they left yesterday and she had to push them into a pile to make room on the table. "But should we?"

Coralee shakes her head. "No. You’ve been off the grid now for a while now. It’s going to have to stay that way."

"I figured as much." She wraps up the leftovers they can save and wipes the table off. Coralee is still scrubbing idly, staring out the kitchen window at the sunset. Alex weighs her options. “Let me help with those,” she says finally, once the lull in the conversation turns to silence.

“Alright. I’ll wash if you dry,” Coralee offers. She moves to make room for Alex at the sink.

Alex takes a towel from the counter, rinses and dries as Coralee passes her plates and cups and cutlery. It’s hard to not sneak a look to the side. The light of the sunset is a nearly blinding red, and Coralee looks the way she does in Strand’s old pictures of her. Older, less at ease, but almost impossible to take your eyes off of.

It isn’t until Coralee speaks that Alex realizes how long she’s been staring.

“Why the caves?” Coralee asks, casually. When her hand touches Alex’s, it’s hot from the water. There are bubbles on the back of her hand and between her fingers.

“You’ve been listening to the podcast,” Alex says. “There are a lot more cave paintings out there than we originally thought.”

“Fair enough. But there’s more to this than old prophetic drawings.”

“It’s kind of hard to dig into the corporate conspiracy side of everything when that corporation has a figurative bounty on your head.” Alex’s heartbeat has started to pick up again, but her voice stays even.

“Oh, it’s literal,” Coralee says. She pushes her hair off her face and doesn’t smile.

“Well, that’s something.”

Coralee shakes her head. “Three hundred thousand somethings, to be exact. It’s mostly for Richard, if I’m being honest with you.”

“I’m almost hurt.” Alex rubs her pruning fingers together, sighs. “What’s a girl gotta do to get some bounty hunters after her?”

“Cut ties with DavaCorp and fake her own death,” Coralee quips, her tone lifting to something just shy of teasing. “It’s not quite as glamorous as it sounds, Alex.”

“I can imagine.”

“If we’re having this conversation,” Coralee sighs, “I should add that I’d be more worried about the prospect of them kidnapping you than killing you.”

“Really?”

“It’d be classic villainy. Very uninspired of them, but it does have a pretty high success rate. Make you the iconic girl tied to the railroad tracks, and then, when Richard comes for you…” She clicks her tongue and makes a vague motion with her hand.

Alex’s stomach twists. “You think he’d do that?”

“He’d do that.” Coralee scrubs and scrubs, and adds, “He did it for me.”

“Yeah, but you were… married.” _In love_ , Alex avoids. _Family_.

"And _you_ were in our honeymoon suite." Coralee's mouth tightens. "He took you there."

"I think took is an overstatement. I kind of forced my way along on that trip."

A handful of silverware drops into the rinse sink with a rattle. There’s an edge to Coralee’s voice. "Richard doesn't do things he doesn't want to. He wanted you there."

"Didn't seem like it," Alex murmurs. She picks up knife after fork after spoon, drying each and setting them in the drawer with the other utensils.

They wash and dry until the stack is down to one lone dish. Alex reaches for it when Coralee hands it to her, but Coralee's grip holds.

"You didn't..." she says, not making eye contact. It takes a long and terrible moment for Alex to realize the end of the question.

"No," Alex rushes. "Of _course_ not."

It feels like an omission. Coralee’s presence makes it feel like an omission--she'd heard that episode, and with the pieces coming together she must realize that, had they been on better terms in Vancouver, that they might have.

Alex was there, and Strand was there, and Coralee, too, was there, like a ghost from decades earlier. She was another anonymous pair of ears on the receiving end of the PNWS feed. It would be like a ménage à trois displaced in time. A hot flush creeps up Alex’s neck and down her shirt.

"Of course not," Coralee repeats, and lets go of the plate.

* * *

 

All the information they've collected is spread out in the house's tiny office. There's no desk, just a tiny card table and two folding chairs.  

Strand has pinned the vital information to the walls, all the crucial pieces of the puzzle as evenly spaced as they could manage, while Alex taped the related pieces of intel underneath. It always seems like a lot, when she's looking at it, but it's the slightest scratch on the top of the mystery. She took as much with her as she could when they left Seattle. 

She spends the afternoon in there, reading the same page of mythological research again and again. Her eyes go crossed and the text blurs together and Coralee and Richard are still somewhere in the house. The thought of sitting down with both of them again makes her heartbeat go off-kilter. 

Tiamat isn't a great distractor. Alex sets the article down feeling no less stuck than before. 

The house is silent, aside from some slight creaking in the wind. Once she's sure the coast is clear, she sneaks down the hall to the bathroom for a shower. It lasts much longer than it takes for the water to wash away all the dirt and grit from the past two days. Alex stays in until the water runs cool and her fingers are pruned and she's almost convinced herself that all of this will end in anything but crushing disappointment, or death, or both.

* * *

 Later, once Strand has had his evening dose of painkillers and drifted off, after Alex helped him into a clean shirt and carefully checked his bandages, Alex finds herself up late again. The master bedroom is open and empty. No light comes in through the windows when she clicks the lamp off.

Alex dips into three different dreams, wakes up sweating and confused, before she decides to stay up for a while.

She finds Coralee at the kitchen table. There’s a cloth laid out in front of her, and her rifle half-disassembled across it. Her long hands are smudged with oil and move easily across each piece. Alex takes a seat across from her and watches in silence.

“Have you ever shot a gun?” Coralee asks.

“Once,” Alex says. “My dad tried taking me out to hunt deer, before we moved closer to the city. I fired, and it knocked me back so hard I fell down and sprained my wrist.”

“How old were you?”

“Eleven. I was a small eleven year old.”

Coralee smiles, and Alex is struck by the sudden warmth of it. “I can imagine. You’re a small thirty-something, too.”

Alex shrugs, ducking her eyes to avoid staring at Coralee’s laugh lines. “It comes in handy. I’m the first person people call when they lock themselves out of their house. I can fit through almost any bathroom window.”

Coralee’s hands move methodically, dabbing oil onto a small scrap of cloth and using a thin rod to push it through the barrel.

“You should teach me how to do that,” Alex says. “Could come in handy.”

“Not today,” she sighs. “I don’t have half the things that I need to do this properly, and all the dust out here is a serious inconvenience.”

“I understand,” Alex says. She pulls her feet up onto the chair, leans her chin on her knees. Immediately it feels childish, but exhaustion has crept up on her since she came down here, and it’s getting hard to sit upright and carry a conversation at the same time.

“Maybe soon,” Coralee amends a few seconds later. Alex tilts her head to see another small smile shift across her mouth. “If you think you can shoot without getting knocked on your ass this time.”

Laughing, Alex wraps her arms around her shins. “I can try,” she says, and repeats it: “I can try.”

Coralee ducks her head to focus on cleaning her rifle. Some of her hair falls out of her loose braid and across her forehead, and Alex gets a little stuck thinking about how impossible Coralee looks at the kitchen table at one in the morning. Surreal, but as real as someone can be when they’re flesh and blood, when their skin is a little shiny with sweat from a long day in the desert. She looks good.

The next thing Alex feels is a hand on her shoulder. The faint sensation of fingers running through her hair, whether real or dreamt, lingers while she wakes up.

“Alex,” someone murmurs.

She lifts her head off of her knees to a sharp pain in her neck, to Coralee leaning against the table and looking down at her with an inscrutable expression on her face.

“That didn’t look very comfortable,” she says.

“It wasn’t,” Alex mumbles. “Thanks.”

“I thought I was going to have to carry you upstairs.”

“No guarantees you won’t.”

Coralee scoffs, moving away from the table and pulling Alex’s chair back.

“I’m not twenty anymore,” she says. For a moment she stands there, not moving back, and Alex wants to lean back until her head rests against Coralee’s stomach--to find out if her body is as hard as it looks, or if it’s softer. Ready to yield.

“Neither am I,” Alex says instead. Her legs ache and tremble when she stands.

Coralee hesitates in the doorway. “Try to sleep longer,” she says. “It’s not a good sign that you’re falling asleep sitting up.”

Alex nods without meeting her eyes, and Coralee steps aside to let her out of the kitchen.

The master bed catches her when she falls into it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, uh... how about that month-long hiatus?
> 
> this fic is getting finished if i have to saw my leg off for it
> 
> (to be fair, i did move at the start of october and pick up 50-hr workweeks)

**Author's Note:**

> this story went through many, many iterations. 
> 
> from a direct adaptation of the V/H/S segment 'second honeymoon' to a bonnie and clyde fic to... this. 
> 
> at least alex is having fun.


End file.
